Well, I can knock out a portion of vectorspace's objections in one easy sentence: Private businesses are not to be mapped because Waze's business model is to sell advertising to businesses that want to be mapped.

While pharmacies may seem to be a public necessity, they're still private businesses. If Waze contracts with CVS to put each of their stores on the map, then they'll lose value in their advertising if editors are adding Walgreens and Rite-Aid locations as landmarks. The same goes for just about every commercial interest on the map.

It's for the same reason that Ramada, Taco Bell, and Dunkin Donuts have spent big bucks with Waze to put their hotels and shops on the maps, we can't put Holiday Inns, Del Taco or Tim Hortons on the map for free.

bgodette wrote:Even though this is locked I feel the need to comment on the argument of "if Waze didn't want X on the map why is there a type for X".

All of the road Types and landmark Types exist because they are the types used in the TIGER data set that Waze imported for NA. They exist because they're in the other data sets, not from any intentional desire by Waze to have those types/objects and has since gone through at least one Type reduction/consolidation that I know of.

I thought I had made this exact comment earlier, but maybe i never got around to it. It's also for the same reason that there are road types available (stairway?) that should never be used in Waze.

tldr: less is more; in general, severely limit landmarks to keep the maps useful.

In my mind, a landmark is generally something that was there 50 years ago and is likely to be there 50 years from now. It is something that is both a significant destination for a majority of the population likely coming to an area as well as a significant visual presence that lends itself to navigating in an unfamiliar area. However, landmarks should be few-and-far-between so that when a user is looking at a map while driving, they aren't forced to process clutter in order to discern their route (this is especially important in denser urban areas).

As such, I'd suggest tempering many of the items in the proposal with a minimum dimension requirement, perhaps modulated with the local population/building/road density as well as with the local building size (where the latter would require that the landmark be significantly larger than surrounding structures) and with the number of existing landmarks in the vicinity.

The first part (minimum dimensions) would help to curb a recent local surge in the addition of "pocket parks" -- mini-greenspaces that, while truly being public parks, are so small as to be indistinguishable from a home or business lawn. I've been toying with a guideline that goes something like "In general, only parks that have actual roads/driveways/parking lots should be mapped"

The first part would also eliminate the "university branches", DMVs, urgent cares, etc. that are little more than a recently vacant storefront in a stripmall -- all of which should be easily located using the in-app search.

The second part (population/road/building density) would keep someone from mapping every DMV, police department, fire department, public restroom, etc. -- again, arguably all things that should be located using the in-app search. (NOTE: the argument that someone would use waze to locate a hospital/fire/police department in an emergency is difficult for me to accept-- in an emergency, I would hope that a user would call 911, not try to search around on waze -- which could be horribly out of date or even devoid of information because of data-service outages -- to find the closest first-responder outpost; I won't even speculate about the liability issues there).

The third part (number of local landmarks in a given area) would also help prevent visual clutter in state capitals, county seats, major metro areas, etc. where there can be a major concentration of public buildings, museums, sporting venues, etc. -- and where making every one of them a landmark means that you end up with a map of landmarks that has an occasional street peering through vs. the more useful-for-navigation map of streets with an occasional landmark.

These all sound like some great guidelines to me! As a relatively new editor I'd be willing to adopt the whole thing as written, right now, just to create more uniform standards.

The only real peeve I have with editing is the landmark for parking lots. I don't think those are necessary at all as long as you have parking lot roads mapped-in and connected to streets to prevent URs and MPs. When I drive by a shopping mall, McDonald's, or the local Wal-Mart, I'd kind of expect that the big, paved, open area in front of the mapped building is going to be a parking lot; creating a landmark for this seems redundant to me. The only thing drivers need to see on the app when driving is the parking lot road leading into the parking lot so they know how to get there and park.